money to replace depleted funds. The
iconic Obama ad, which ran repeatedly,
had Romney singing-poorly-"America
the Beautifuf' as a series of stark facts
appeared on the screen: ''In business, Mitt
Romney's firms shipped jobs to Mexico
and China. . . . As governor, Romney out-
sourced jobs to India. . . . He had mil-
lions in a Swiss bank account. . . Tax ha-
vens like Bermuda. . . And the Cayman
Islands. . . . Mitt Romney's not the solu-
tion. Hès the problem."
The decision to run an early negative
campaign has worked well for other in-
cumbents. In 1972, supporters of Richard
Nixon famously associated George Mc-
Govern with "amnesty, abortion, and
acid." Bill Clinton launched an ad cam-
paign against his eventual opponent, Bob
Dole, a full year before the 1996 general
election, that highlighted Dole's cuts to
Medicare and other popular government
programs. In 2004, George W. Bush
tagged John Kerry as an out-of-touch lib-
eral and a flip-flopper before Kerry could
gain his bearings after the hard-fought
Democratic primaries. As one senior
Obama official said, unabashedly, the 2004
and 2012 campaigns are "mirror images"
of each other: "They made Kerry an unac-
ceptable alternative, and wève done that to
Romney." For a while, it seemed to be
working. By the time the general-election
campaign began, Romney had become the
first Presidential candidate of either party
in the past seven elections to start Septem-
ber with his approval rating upside down:
more voters said they had an unfavorable
opinion of him than a favorable one.
Messina, who pointed out that the cam-
paign also spent thirty million dollars on
positive ads boosting Obama, believed the
early advertising was crucial, given the del-
uge of political ads that would hit voters in
the fall. "October TV matters less," he
said. 'We decided to make a grand bet."
But there was more to the strategy than
just damaging Romney. Messinà s bet was
the first stage of a two-part strategy. Over
the past four Presidential election cycles,
even as campaign strategists have spent
more on the blunt instrument of TV ad-
vertising (the air war), the work being
done at the grass-roots level to reach voters
in person (the ground game) has become
far more important. As Messina described
it, the summer airwave blitz would soften
up the opponent in the eyes of voters,
but victory would be carried home by
Obamàs volunteer army on the ground.
'We believe that, in this age of satura-
tion television, eventually people are
going to throw their TV as far as they can
out of their window, and look to their
neighbors and family to have a discus-
sion about how they're going to vote,"
Messina said. "And we're going to be in-
tegral to that moment-that is our entire
moment." What could go wrong?
O bamà s 2012 campaign began in De-
cember of 2008. As many of the
campaign staffwere packing up for Wash-
ington to work in the new Administra-
tion, Jeremy Bird, who had run operations
in Ohio, travelled to Chicago to start
working on Obamàs reëlection. Along
with a group of ten or so mid-level cam-
paign workers, Bird conducted a rigorous
study of the President's victory over Mc-
Cain, analyzing what had worked in 2008
and what had not. As the national field di-
rector, Bird, thirty-four, now oversees the
campaign's ground game nationwide.
Bird's team was roughly divided be-
tween data-crunching experts and field ex-
perts who had run swing states, including
Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Colorado. 'We
did thousands of phone interviews with or-
ganizers and volunteers," Bird told me.
'We brought them in in small groups. We
looked at everything. What did we learn
about organizing the African-American
community? What did we learn about or-
ganizing the Latino community? What did
we learn about organizing rural communi-
ties? What did we learn about organizing
and management in general?" After two
months, they wrote up their findings in a
memo-a postmortem that formed the
blueprint for the 2012 effort. This eventu-
ally became a detailed field manual in-
structing top Obama operatives in how to
build and train a volunteer network and
win in the most competitive states.
Thin and bespectacled, Bird grew up in
Missouri, the son of devout Baptist parents.
He went on to Harvard Divinity School,
where he studied conflict resolution and the
role of religion in politics and war. One of
his professors, Marshall Ganz, a veteran
organizer of Southern blacks in the civil-
rights era and for United Farm Workers in
California, introduced him to an organizing
philosophy that emphasizes what Ganz de-
scribes as "the role of storytelling-and
emotion-in motivating participation." In
Canis class, Bird found himselfin the mid-
dle of a successful campaign that organized
kids in Dorchester and Roxbury with the
aim of persuading the Boston city council
to veto the mayor's budget and increase
funding for their schools. "I loved it," Bird
said. ''It just spoke to everything I wanted to
do. The change that we made on a small
scale got me interested in politics." He won-
dered what would happen, he said, "if you
could replicate that on a bigger scale." He
worked for Howard Dean in 2003, and for
John Kerry in 2004. When Bird learned
that Barack Obama, who was then on his
way to the U.S. Senate, had studied and
practiced the same kind of community or-
ganizing he had learned, he vowed to work
for Obama ifhe ever ran for President. By
2007, Ganz had become an adviser to the
national campaign and Bird was organizing
Obamàs primary campaign in South Car-
olina. There he applied Ganz's philosophy,
adding to it new technological tools for mo-
bilizing voters.
Bird shares a cramped office with Mitch
Stewart, a fellow-organizer. Maps of the
swing states cover the walls. In the past de-
cade, campaigns have increasingly relied on
empirical research to determine the best
way to get voters to the polls. Birel's effort
was a refinement of that approach. Almost
everything that a modem Presidential cam-
paign does to garner votes falls into two cat-
egories: persuasion and mobilization. For
decades, persuasion was considered the key
to winning, and the gurus and the consul-
tants promised candidates that they could
craft messages to win over uncommitted
voters. As television ads became the domi-
nant method of persuasion, ad-makers,
such as Bob Shrum and Roger Ailes, be-
came rich and famous, while unknown op-
eratives like Bird were starved for resources.
But, as the electorate has become in-
creasingly polarized, campaign tacticians
have become focussed more on getting their
own voters to the polls than on persuading
others to change their allegiance. In the past
three Presidential elections, there has been
a marked decline in the number of Ameri-
cans likely to be persuaded to vote for the
opposing party. According to the American
National Election Studies, "ticket split-
ters" - voters who cast ballots for a Repub-
lican and a Democrat-decreased from
thirty per cent, in 1972, to nineteen per
cent, in 2000. After the 1996 election, many
labor unions, long the most important out-
side group to spend money on behalf of
Democratic candidates, shifted from reaching
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 29 & NOVEMBER 5, 2012 63